


Changing Shadows

by BlueJayRose



Series: Sacred Lies and Telling Tales [2]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Awesome Hel, F/M, Frigga is an awesome grandma, Gen, Loki's Kids, Loki-centric, Manipulative Hel, Not Really Character Death, Relationship breakdown, Unhealthy Relationships, loki is a good parent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-09
Updated: 2014-11-12
Packaged: 2018-02-24 18:14:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2591345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueJayRose/pseuds/BlueJayRose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The people of Asgard cheer when Loki marries Sigyn, but when they first see the face of his daughter, they whisper, mutter and gossip. He doesn’t care, because all of them are wrong, and he loves Hel more than any of them. Hel is sweet, even if she is sinister and sickly, and Loki would do anything to keep her safe and well, he would go to the ends of the Realms. He would go where no one else has gone before. </p>
<p>He will do anything. Whatever it takes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Blood Will Tell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Frigga looks at her granddaughter, she sees suffering and pain and death. She also sees love and devotion and pride and acceptance and calm and serenity. That is not a bad kind of life to live. Frigga loves her granddaughter Hel, because she is a wise woman, and she has no problem with loving monsters.

The first time that Loki meets Sigyn, he believes that he loves her. She is very beautiful, with her auburn hair and dancing blue eyes, but what he loves about her is the mischief, the spark and fire in her. She’s stubborn and clever, and she laughs at Loki’s tricks whilst others hide their smiles behind their hands. She has read just as many books as Loki has, and knows easily as much as him, though she does not practice magic. She and Loki spend hours together, laughing, talking, learning, and he realises that he did not love her when he first met her, that what he felt then was nothing, because it does not even vaguely compare to how much he loves her now. The first time he kisses her, she giggles because he does not know what he is doing, but she is kind when she shows him how to do it better. 

When Loki and Sigyn are married, it is spring, and there are garlands of flowers in her hair. The people are cheering because they think that the dark prince has mellowed, now that he has found his beautiful bride, and he shares a smile with Sigyn, because they do not understand anything. Sigyn does not laugh at him on their wedding night, because both of them are learning. But it’s ok, because they are both quick studies. 

Loki has been married to Sigyn for one, perfect, shining year when she tells him that she is pregnant. He is delighted to hear the news, as is she to report it. They talk to the seers, and to Frigga, who tells her that the child will be a girl, and that she will be strong. She smiles at him as she says this. His father and his brother congratulate him, and Loki thanks them, sincerely. The people of Asgard cheer and revel in the streets at the news of a future princess, and Loki does not join them, but he shares their sentiment. Sigyn grows big with child, and Loki thinks that she looks even more beautiful than she ever has before. 

He panics a few times, quietly and in private, about how he will be as a father to his new child, but he eventually realises that no one else in his position can know any more than he does, and there is nothing that he can be doing that he is not already, because his mother tells him so, in none too uncertain terms.

Their daughter is born in winter. When the child is born, she is half perfect. The left side of her body is as blue-eyed haired and fair and beautiful as her mother, though her hair is black as her father’s, black as her grandfather’s raven’s wings. However, her right side is where most eyes rest first. Her right eye is as red as the clouds can be at sunset and her skin is the colour of the sky at twilight, a blue of the deepest hue. There are markings on her skin that look like the raised tissue of healed cuts, but they are not. The markings are distinctive of good breeding and beauty, and they make half of her face look like a skull. 

When Sigyn sees her child, she screams and cries and begs for it not to be true. She prays that she has not given birth to this mutilated half-ling, this cursed child, but the midwifes cannot tell her otherwise. She tells them to take it away from her, to kill it, drown it, burn it, but they give her herbal tea with sedatives and give the child to Loki instead. 

When he holds his daughter in his arms for the first time, Loki understands what love is, true love. He holds this child that is half his, half monster, and he loves her. She is crying and screaming, because she hasn’t been alive long enough to see any reason not to, but he rocks her in his arms, shushes her, coos at her until she stops. She looks up at him, with mismatched eyes, and Loki understands what his mother meant when she said her granddaughter would have to be strong, but remembers that she was smiling when she said it. He loves his daughter, and he vows to protect her. 

\---

When Frigga looks at her granddaughter, she sees suffering and pain and death. She also sees love and devotion and pride and acceptance and calm and serenity. That is not a bad kind of life to live. Frigga loves her granddaughter Hel, because she is a wise woman, and she has no problem with loving monsters. 

\---

When Sigyn wakes up, she is much calmer. She asks to see her daughter, holds her in her arms, and looks at her mismatched eyes, understands that it is not the child’s fault that she is like this. She loves her, because a mother can’t not. Still, she is not proud of her daughter. 

Loki and Sigyn call their daughter Hel, because it sounds sweet, and as she grows, it becomes more and more obvious that Hel is sweet. She puts people on edge, her nurses and tutors and other children, but it’s not her fault that she’s different, that her skin looks wrong. Still, she is a sweet child. She’s kind to animals, and polite to other children, even when they fail miserably to hide that they are afraid to be near her. She’s obedient and eager to please, and very clever. She is weak and sickly for much of the time, spends most of her childhood reading, learning of other realms, cultures and people through words as she cannot through experience. She delights in weaving spells, in illusions of light especially. Her favorite trick is to devise the image of a big black wolf. She calls him Fen, and he is her pet, and her confidant, and her playmate. He’s the daughter of the god of mischief’s imaginary friend. (Loki knows that seeing him bounding after the image of a stick that Hel has pretended to throw across the palace grounds to retrieve it for her, the sight of him running swift as the night and carrying it in his mouth with his huge, sharp teeth terrifies the servants, but at this point, he really doesn’t care what anyone else thinks of his daughter, because they are all wrong.) Loki tells her stories from his travels, visits to Midgard, his adventures with Thor, and his own trips to Alvheim to learn magic and crafts from the elves, and his tales of the wars with Jotunheim and Muspelheim. Hel listens to everything he says carefully and patiently, and learns well. She knows that her father does not tell her any lies, because he has promised her such.

Hel is a sweet child, but her disfigurement pushes Loki and Sigyn apart. Sigyn blames Loki for Hel’s deformity, saying that he has warped himself with the magic he practices, that he dabbles in dark arts, or else that he is simply wrong in his bones, and he has passed on this curse to her. Loki knows she only says this because she is terrified that it is somehow her fault, but he cannot bring himself to comfort her when she is insulting their precious child as well as himself.

At first Sigyn makes her daughter wear a veil in public, so the majority of Asgard knows nothing of her appearance except that it is unnatural. Loki argues with her, tells her that allowing her to remain unknown and unknowable will only make her more feared, alone and hated, but Sigyn refuses to change her stance. While Hel wears the veil, she cannot walk freely in public without people giving her second glances, whispering behind their hands about the deformed princess, their attitudes ranging from pitiful to curious to disturbed, and she cannot play with other children. The power with which this makes Loki wants to burn down his beloved home, the golden realm of Asgard, seriously scares Loki, sometimes. Loki tries to convince Sigyn that his magic is not harmful to Hel and eventually, with Frigga and several royal mages vouching for him, Sigyn concedes to allowing Loki to mask Hel in illusions so that she can play with other children. 

It’s good for Hel, allowing her to play with other children, and anyone can see it, but Loki is angry that his daughter should have to feel that she should mask herself in order to be worthy in anyone’s presence. He knows that is how he felt, with Thor’s friends, but it makes him angry to think that his child should have to do the same. He tries to convince Sigyn, but she will not listen to him. It angers him greatly that anyone should think that Hel is any lesser for how she looks, let alone her own mother. Loki believes that his daughter is wholly perfect, rather than half, and he can’t believe that Sigyn doesn’t see it. Eventually, the strain is too much, and Sigyn and Loki break apart. He still loves her, and she says that she still loves him, but it’s not enough. She moves back to her mothers house, and leaves Hel at the royal palace with Loki. For this, for leaving Hel to finish growing up without a mother, Loki will never forgive her. 

The year that Hel reaches adulthood, she becomes more ill than she ever has done before. She has always been more liable to sickness than most, and not as boisterous as other children even when well, though she has always pulled through. Her bones have ached all her life, but she always survives. This year, Loki is not sure. She has been spending more and more time sick instead of well, and Loki fears that this illness may be her final one. The illness is not in her chest or heart; it is not a fever or disease. The fault is something deeper within her. She struggles to breathe, her heart struggles to pump blood. She cannot eat, and barely sleeps. She can tell Loki that she is in pain, but she cannot pinpoint where. Every part of her feels wrong. Hel is dying.

Loki panics. He cannot loose his daughter. He will not. 

Loki calls in a large proportion of the favours he is owed to try to find answers. He gets the advice of every higher mage in Asgard, and, when none of that proves useful, every mage in Alvheim too. He tries every sacred fruit the Vanir can grow to try to heal her, but none of them work. He asks Frigga for help, but she has no words of advice for him, only of comfort. 

Desperate, Loki makes the long and treacherous journey to Mime’s Well, in the heart of a desolate valley in Jotunheim, where, despite the below zero temperatures and the ice surrounding it, the well is full of water. He spills his blood into the water as sacrifice, and it dissipates so quickly that the water is completely clear by the time he goes to drink it. He drinks deeply, the liquid burning with coldness down his throat, and he passes out in the cold and the ice. (When he awakes, he believes that it is only luck that the cold does not freeze him to death, and curses himself for his idiocy in not taking precautions). Loki’s dreams are fevered and full of red eyes and blue skin, and a landscape full of rock and mist where nothing, absolutely nothing, ever grows. The dreams follow him when he wakes; as he looks down at his hands as he rises from the snow, they appear as blue as the Jotun skin in his dreams. The colour quickly fades as he stands up and casts a warming spell around himself, and he shakes off the last vestiges of the nightmare. His dreams have left him exhausted, instead of rested, and once he returns to Asgard he sleeps for hours. When he wakes, it is three days later than he left, and he knows what he must do.

He takes his beloved, precious daughter to the land where nothing grows, the coldest realm of them all, the nicknamed land of the dead. Niflheim. No life has ever evolved to live here; there are no plants in the rocky crevices of it’s mountains. It’s far too cloudy and dark for any kind of plant to survive, and any kind of animal in the Nine Realms would choke at the mists it is full of, but Loki casts spells of protection around them, and ensures that their lungs remain as oxygenated as they would have done in Asgard. It is a complex spell, and it taxes him, but Loki maintains it. He has been learning magic for his entire life, and this is not above him.

People say that below Niflheim is the place where dead souls go. People say that there is a place in the heart of the Realm where the dead sink into the ground, that there is a portal to another Realm, another plane, beneath the rocks and mist and ice. Loki does not put much stock in mere rumour, but this is more than that. This is a tale spoken in every one of the realms. The branches of Yggdrasil can be mapped in the night skies in every Realm, and every one maps a Realm that cannot be traveled to. It is a fact that there are nine Realms, when only eight can be traveled. The rumour is that the gateway to the ninth is in Niflheim. 

People occasionally wander through Niflheim, on their way to other places, or because they’re lost; Niflheim’s mountains and valleys are very steep, difficult to traverse, and nigh impossible to navigate, since no one’s ever stayed here long enough to make a very accurate map. It’s not unheard of for hermits to live here, because a graveyard is the ultimate place of solitude. 

People sometimes come to Niflheim, but no one travels here for this long. There is an instinct in the mind of every being in the Nine Realms to avoid stepping on a grave, and that’s what being in this place feels like, but amplified. It’s more than a taboo, it’s more than a fear. Even breathing in this place feels sacrosanct.

Loki carries his daughter, young and feeble but almost as tall as he, in his arms, and walks further and further into Niflheim until he can see no more rocks, no more mountains, only mists. He walks as the feeling of wrongness, of violating something sacred increases. There are tears spilling down his cheeks but he ignores them because both of his hands are carrying his daughter. She might have passed out, she’s so still and silent in his arms. He can’t even see her breathing anymore. He hopes that she is merely sleeping. He hopes that he is not too late.

He ventures further into the unchartered, unowned territories of Niflheim than anyone before him, and since. He searches for the doorway to the land of the dead. He senses that he is walking between the borders between realms, a rip in the fabric of the universe, a bridge between the branches of Yggdrasil. That is when he stops walking. Now there is no more mist, and all that is left is whiteness and coolness, and the air no longer feels clammy against his skin, but dry. 

Niflheim is the place where nothing grows. It cannot support life. At the same time, nothing laid here can rot. Nothing can decay, because there is nothing to decompose it. The cold preserves. Loki lays his daughter’s body in what is truly the land of the dead, what is more than the heart of a frozen realm. Here, everything is white, and he feels like he’s a murderer in a church, and it’s cold but he can’t see his breath in front of his face. Though that could be because of how everything that isn’t him and Hel just looks like white. There is no horizon, no boundary between ground and sky. He can’t see any stars, or moons, or suns. Loki’s used to hopping from planet to planet, and suspended realms such as Asgard, and moons and space ships. He’s used to the changing effects of gravity, air pressure, atmosphere, planet rotation, but this place doesn’t feel like anything he’s ever felt before. 

He ignores every instinct that tells him he should not be here, and begins his task of casting spell work around Hel that will keep her body perfect for millennia. The magic is ancient and complicated, and if Sigyn could see him now, she would hate him. It’s known as dark magic on Asgard. It’s primitive and brutal but it’s effective. It’s blood magic. Loki binds his magic into his daughter’s body, and uses some of hers as well there are tears falling from his eyes as he cuts into her arm, but she just nods and smiles when he glances at her for permission, eyes half closed.

Loki thanks the stars that she was not dead before, just sleeping, and it is only when he knows it is not true that he acknowledges how terrified he was that he had lost her. From that moment he is certain that what he is doing is the right thing, because Hel is not someone who should ever die. 

Hel is not as powerful as he is - she has had mere moments to study the art in comparison to his years of study - but her mind is strong and it and she knows enough to help in his efforts. She knows enough to sense the webs of the spell he is weaving, to aid in it’s construction, even though, in a way, she is weaving her own funeral shroud. 

Loki is making her immortal with what most mages call death magic, but he’s using a spell that no one’s ever heard of before. It’s completely of his own making. He can’t remember thinking of it, but he knows it came to him in his sleep, after his visit to the Mime’s Well. One way or another, the seal to his daughter’s fate will be entirely his own.

The spell, once finished, will hold her body in suspension in a place where he knows no harm will come to her; he’s binding her soul to her body. If any harm did come to her physical self, she would be cast adrift in the universe, unable to leave it, to move on or to vanish whatever should happen to dead souls (Loki’s a god but he’s not a Norn, he doesn’t know the infinite secrets of the universe). She could become a ghost, but Loki won’t let that happen to his daughter. She’s in the safest place in the world, where nothing alive will ever venture to hurt her. Loki is protecting her, from the world, and from the frailty of her own body. Hel will never die, or at least, not truly. Her body will never decay, and her soul will remain tethered to this realm for as long as his magic lasts. He ensures that is millennia, at least as long as the Aesir lifespan, maybe more. She will be able to travel, to visit other realms for as long as she wishes. She will use her light illusions to give herself a presence in any place she wants to be. Perhaps one day they will find a way for her to be able to touch things, to have a more physical presence, outside of her true body. She will be able to dream walk, to talk to anyone she wants to, and, if she wants, they won’t remember it. She may not be able to have the life of a princess as she deserves, or a normal one, but she will be free, and as almost-immortal as any Asgardian, and this is the best that Loki can do for her.

Her magic weaves around his, flows into the shapes he’s making, fills out the framework of his knowledge and experience, and soon enough the spell work is cast, and he has to finish it. Loki leans back, on his knees past the doorway to the realm of dead things and scores a deep cut through his left forearm so that the blood falls onto his daughter’s throat. Then, he tells her, “Be strong now, sweet,” prays it isn’t goodbye, and runs his knife across her neck. The cut is shallow, far from lethal, but with it, their blood mixes in the hollow at the base of her throat and the magic is set. Hel breathes her last breath, and now, her body is nothing more than dead weight, where he is supporting her head. He lays it gently on the ground. 

He’s completely drained. He’s used up all the magic he has, possibly more than he has, he’s used up everything. He poured his soul into that spell work and now he has nothing left. He thinks his vision is blurry, but it’s hard to tell in this place where everything is white. There are tears streaming down his cheeks now, but he still ignores them, because he’s still not done. Loki uses the very last vestiges of his magic, his strength, to carve a hole into the rock below him. It’s as wide and tall as Hel is, and it’s six feet deep. He lowers his daughter’s body into it’s grave, gently, tenderly, using magic he didn’t know he had to make sure she lands without the slightest bump at the bottom. He settles the rock back around her, using the excess that used to be in the space that her body now occupies to form round stones, and uses shaking hands to fashion them into a cairn. 

When he gets up, he sways slightly, and he’s hearing a ringing in his ears now. He walks, staggers, really, out of the place where everything is white back into Niflheim. He can feel the change between the realms, the point where the one becomes the other, and it’s always jarring but right now it’s too much, it makes him dizzy. He falls to the ground, and passes out. 

Later, he doesn’t know how much later, he wakes up. Some of his magic is back, as well as his strength, but now he’s starving hungry, and thirsty too. He walks until he gets to the portal back to Asgard, and then he walks through forests, fields, villages, to a place where he can buy a fast horse back to the palace. When he gets there, he eats, then sleeps, then he talks to his mother. She tells him he was gone for four days, but he knows how time can become distorted between the realms, and he isn’t worried. Frigga understands what he has done, of course she does. She knows what he did, and why he had to do it, he doesn’t have to explain it to her. She tells him she’s sure Hel will be fine, and that the next time he sees her, he should pass on her regards. There’s a lump in his throat at that, he’s not sure why. He thinks it’s because he’s so very, very glad that his mother, seer of Asgard, is so sure that he will see his daughter again. He can only now acknowledge how afraid he was that it wasn’t so.

Three nights after he gets back from Niflheim, his daughter appears to him in his dreams. She tells him that her new life is odd, but she’s getting used to it quickly. Her body doesn’t hurt her anymore; she no longer lives in pain. It’s strange, not being tied down to her body in the same way any more, but she can go almost anywhere now, as long as she can picture something of it in her mind. She’s planning on traveling around the Nine Realms, which up until now have been no more than bedtime stories to her. She’s going to try to meet some new people. She’s always loved magic, as he knows, and she wants to learn from the mages she’s heard of, whose works she wants to see. He can see she’s apprehensive, but she’s always been brave, and now she’s free, too. He tells her that it she’ll be fine, she’s going to do so well, that he’s proud of her for being so strong, that she’s the sweetest thing he knows, that he’s so, so glad she’s okay. He tells her to call in on her grandmother when she can, because Frigga’s been missing her, and to let Thor and Odin know that she is safe and well, more or less. When he embraces her in his dream, it feels as if she’s really there in his arms, and when he wakes up, he’s crying, but he’s smiling too. 

\---

Loki tells Thor that his niece is safe, and living somewhere where her delicate state of health is provided for, from whence she can leave for short visits, but not come all the way to Asgard. Thor is disappointed that he may no longer see his beloved niece, but Loki reassures him that Hel may visit Thor in his dreams, and will ever be out of contact with him. He doesn’t want Thor to think that Hel can’t leave, can’t travel and have the full life that she deserves, but he doesn’t want him to imagine he can visit her in person either.

Loki tells Odin that he has found somewhere that Hel’s body can remain, and be cared for, but that she can’t leave. He says that, whilst she sleeps, she can travel the Nine Realms on the astral plane, and Odin believes him. 

It’s funny, but when Loki was younger, he always expected to be caught out with even a half-truth such as this to Odin All-father, but he’s starting to realise that Odin cannot truly be as omniscient as all of the kingdom of Asgard seems to believe. If it were true, then he would be unbeatable in combat, and flawless as a ruler. That is not the case. Odin makes mistakes, just like any other king. 

Odin doesn’t know that his son Loki used death and blood magic to bind his daughter’s soul to her body for eternity. Odin doesn’t know that Loki did something that no one else has ever done, by putting a soul with solid links to the Nine Realms into the land of the dead, tied to a physical body. Odin didn’t even know that it was possible for anything physical to pass into the realm where dying souls go.

Odin didn’t know that that realm has been called Helheim in the minds of the Norns since the Nine Realms came into existence. He didn’t know that Hel is now the only soul, in the whole of existence, ever, to have one foot in the land of the living and one in the land of the dead, and to have knowledge of both. He didn’t know that her existence was written into the universe, that her name was spoken in every realm, after and before her birth, in many languages, and always, eventually, meant death.

Loki didn’t know any of this either, of course, though over the years, he guessed at some. Hel found out soon enough though.

After a couple of centuries - after Hel’s appearances in the dreams of monarchs and politicians averted several wars, and her visits to the musings of a number of poets and musicians earned several ballads in her name - that’s when the population of most every realm started to call the Ninth Realm, that had always been observed but never known, by the name of Helheim. Hel was never a true princess of Asgard, but she still became a Queen. They called her Queen of the Dead, and they feared her, but they did not hate her, on the whole, because it is hard to hate someone like Hel. She meddled a little, but mostly travelled. Hel learned all she could of everything she could, her presence invisible and barely felt, until she herself could almost challenge Odin for the claim to omniscience. After a millennia, many poets, priests, politicians, authors and mages claimed to have met her in her dreams, and some of them weren’t even lying. Most begged her to tell them secrets of the afterlife, but she would never answer their questions to their satisfaction (though they often did not realise so until after they had awoken from their slumbers). 

Hel knew all of the secrets that they wanted to know. She knows what happens to souls after they die, she knows what the Norns’ plan is, she knows of the prophecies of Ragnarok, of the end of the world, of the roles that her family will play in the apocalypse. She knows that a snake will encircle Midgard, and a wolf of her father’s creation will swallow the sun. She knows that her grandfather’s blood is not her own, that her father will one day come to hate her uncle, that one day her grandmother will die. She knows that one day, her family will try to kill each other. 

But she does not tell anyone anything. Even when she wants to, she can’t. Even when she knows she could save the ones she loves from suffering, she cannot tell them what path to take. She isn’t allowed to tell any of them anything; nobody’s told her this, but she knows. Self-fulfilling prophecies are fine in theory and fiction, but if one were allowed to occur in reality, it would rip the universe apart. So Hel tells no one what she knows. She is her father’s daughter after all. She knows about secrets.

\---

However. If Hel were to - hint. On her occasional visits to her grandmother’s dreams. If she were to...indicate...the way that certain tides of time may be turning. If she made polite conversation ever so slightly overlaid with code. If she were to supplement the gifts and knowledge of her grandmother - by love if not by birth - with her own insight gained from being just a little removed from the same limited planes of existence that all other living souls inhabited...just to lend a helping hand...well. That’s not really. Telling. Per say.

And these poets and peasants on Midgard, they really do make up some ridiculous stories sometimes.

\---

Frigga loves her granddaughter and both of her sons very much. 

Frigga does not know everything, and neither does Odin, and neither does Hel, but between them, well, they know quite a lot.

The Midgardian will believe anything you tell them, at this time, especially if you appear to them out of the sky on a rainbow-coloured lightning-strike. 

There is a war coming, not yet, and not now, but it’s sewn into the souls of the two sons of Asgard, and it’s going to be a big one. There will be casualties.

It’s only fair that the Midgardian have some forewarning. It won’t be for a long while yet, but they will remember.


	2. Snakes and Wolves

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Angrboda laughs when he tries to charm her, calling him smarmy princeling. When he is aloof and disdainful, she is irritating and mocking until she can goad him into a genuine response of anger, whereupon she smiles smugly like she’s won something. When he boasts of his power, she makes crude innuendos and tells him he’s overcompensating. When he tries to scare her, she giggles and tells him, “You wouldn’t dare.”

The first time that Loki sees Angrboda, he thinks that she looks dangerous. Like a coiled snake, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

This is years after Sigyn, after the scandal of their marriage and divorce. The people are still talking about it though, discussing and speculating and gossiping about him, as if they actually know anything of him, of them, as if they understood. Half of them think that Loki grieves misses her still, even remains celibate in her absence, the other half think he’s screwing all the Nine Realms and their sisters. It’s not even a convincing enough lie to be flattering. 

But Loki himself does not still dwell on it. Those in power in Asgard are all of them in his pocket these days, and now that the courts of Asgard are his to govern, he is seeking to extend his influence into other realms. It is harder; he must wear disguises to pass as one of the native species, learning the legal systems of realms he has previously only visited for weeks at a time, learning to manipulate them. Loki learns quickly though. 

His absence from his usual duties must not be noticed in Asgard, and Loki experiments with using illusions to stand in his stead. They require great concentration to maintain, and they are still mere images of light as opposed to a true presence, but he learns, and he trains himself for days on end until he can hold two of them in different places at the same time, and then practices further until he can hold two conversations simultaneously, and intelligently. It’s hard, it stretches his mind and strains him, but it feels invigorating as well as exhausting. If nothing else, he sleeps very well now. He sees his daughter quite often, although she is almost as busy these days as he is, and that’s nice. 

Frigga tells him he’s working too hard, stretching himself too soon. He should take a break, give himself some rest. The palace staff whisper that he has become colder since loosing his wife and child. As if they knew anything. They don’t know what happened to Hel. Some of them think she’s dead, but other’s whisper that Loki is not wearing grieving clothes, so she must have survived. People saw him coming back from Niflheim, leaving with Hel and coming back without her, and they are telling everyone they know, though as yet, few believe them. Loki doesn’t care what they think of him, what theories they have, what lies they tell. None of their lies matter, because none of them are as finely woven as his own. They have no power.

When Loki first sees Angrboda, it is because he needs to find a tracking amulet embedded with the most potent kind of magic that he can find. Hel has been complaining that it’s too hard to find his sleeping mind when he strays too far from his usual bed, on one of his travels in other realms. She says she doesn’t appreciate taking hours out of her busy social schedule to hunt him down, especially as he is the one who kicks up a fuss if she doesn’t make the effort to talk to him every few days. Hel has done some research on his behalf, she says, and there’s a mage living in Vanaheim who can make the kind of amulet which would shine bright enough that she can see it, and find him, however far from home he strays. Dutifully, Loki searches out this mage. Sometimes, Loki feels like a slave to his darling dead daughter. 

When he knocks on her door, Angrboda opens it, looks at him for a moment, and then starts grinning. She looks like she’s seen a hilarious joke, perhaps one that he was too slow to catch. She looks like a wolf whose prey has just walked itself into her lair. She looks like she knows something he doesn’t. She looks dangerous. She says, “Loki. Welcome.” He steps inside, and she closes the door behind him. 

The amulet is made within the hour. It takes shape as a locket, fashioned out of a black metal that Angrboda says is mined from the deepest, darkest mines of Svartalvheim. Inside it is a lock of Loki’s hair, braided together with a lock of Hel’s that Loki cut from her when she was a young child and got it badly tangled, and never wanted to throw away. It was nothing but sentiment, truly, and sometimes Loki chides himself for that sort of thing, but today, it serves it’s purpose. 

Angrboda is both a talented smith and mage; she casts the locket from her own private store of the metal, heating it and then pouring the molten metal into the mould using techniques she says she learned in Muspelheim, all without any protection from the heat that has Loki stepping back from the forge in discomfort. She laughs, when she sees this, mocks him for having such a cold heart, that cannot stand the barest hint of warmth. 

No one talks like this to Loki, prince of one realm and ruler of many, no one dares. But Angrboda dares, and Loki finds it strangely refreshing. She’s sharp and quick and talking to her is surprisingly easy. It’s so invigorating, especially in comparison to days spent holding monotonous, mundane conversations, manipulating people to the point of running rings around them without even trying. 

Angrboda laughs when he tries to charm her, calling him smarmy princeling. When he is aloof and disdainful, she is irritating and mocking until she can goad him into a genuine response of anger, whereupon she smiles smugly like she’s won something. When he boasts of his power, she makes crude innuendos and tells him he’s overcompensating. When he tries to scare her, she giggles and tells him, “You wouldn’t dare.”

\---

That night, when Loki drifts off to sleep in his rented bed in Vanaheim, Hel finds him almost instantly, and asks him, “So? Did you like her?”

Apparently, it’s very easy to get to know mages who deal with the occult daily when you’re as entrenched in the astral plane as Hel is. Apparently, Frigga and Hel are united in their opinion that Loki should “stop pining after Mother” and “get out more” because “I’m dead and I have more friends than you do, it’s atrocious, Father”. Apparently, Frigga and Hel have talks about him behind his back. Apparently, Hel is setting him up with people now. 

Loki’s not sure whether to be outraged, horrified or amused, but ends up being more of the latter than anything else. And eventually he can’t help but admit that he does, in fact, like Angrboda a lot. The locket works magnificently; Hel never has any trouble with locating him anywhere in all of the Nine Realms any more, though her visits don’t become very much more frequent. Loki understands, really. Hel has a very busy social life.

\---

In the next few months, Loki finds as many excuses as he can to ask Angrboda for aid, with magic or with works of craftsmanship. Eventually, he stops bothering, because there is no real reason that he should hide the fact that he is interested in her, and because she charges very, very steeply for the services and products she provides. The first time he comes to her and tells her that he has come to spend time with her as a friend instead of a paying customer, she thinks it’s hilarious, and tells him he sounds like a nervous courter to a whore he adores. He tells her that she can see how she made that mistake, as she is obviously a woman of loose virtue, and so very keen to take his money.

Three days later, they kiss for the first time, and it feels like he’s drowning. It feels perfect.

They experiment together with magics that other mages have never dared meddle with, the most volatile, undocumented types of spells, the rarest of materials, the most outlandish ideas. Sometimes, they create merely mess, other times explosions, but sometimes, they create miracles. 

Loki spends more time with Angrboda than he does anywhere else, first in Vanaheim, and then, when she is caught by a flight of fancy and decides to move, in Alvheim, and then, when he convinces her they will have easier access to his own not inconsiderate stores of materials, in his most private rooms in Asgard. It is not in the palace that he spends all his available time with her, rather in the woods on the outskirts of the realm where he keeps a house that no servants ever visit, and the people avoid. There are rumours that the entire forest is haunted. Loki is not scared by the rumours however. He started them.

Here, they have peace, and all the materials and equipment they could need. They meet regularly, as often as they both can. They work magic and make love, and Loki thinks that maybe this is what a healthy relationship should look like. 

He spends less time at the palace, or in the courts and governments of any of the realms, but he’s still sleeping just as well as he did before. Hel is interested in the magic he’s working, asks him about his experiments, and he can tell she approves of his relationship with Angrboda because she doesn’t tease him about it. Doesn’t tease him for how many times he mentions her without meaning to in casual conversation, how many anecdotes he relates to her have Angrboda as their main component, how the scenery of his habitual dreamscape has turned into their workshop, rather than his rooms at the palace or the woods surrounding Asgard. She just smiles smugly sometimes with a look that says, ‘I told you so’.

\---

Loki and Angrboda stay together for years, and Loki knows it won’t last forever, because neither of them are that sort of people, but he still can’t help hoping that it never ends. Loki loves Angrboda. He loves the sound of her laugh, of how she is often joyful, sometimes mocking, always fond. He loves how she makes him feel, like they will never, ever have enough time in the world to spend with each other, but there’s no need to rush anyway. He loves making love with her; neither of them are inexperienced - he was neither as celibate nor as promiscuous as the gossips of Asgard assume in his wife’s absence - and it almost feels the same as when they’re talking or working, always testing each other, always creating something new.

Angrboda and Loki push the boundaries of magic further than any known mage ever has before them. Their creations are sometimes useless, but more often terrifying or glorious. They make a cloak that will cast the wearer in shadows, out of sight and out of mind, even to the eyes of Odin Allfather. They make knives that will hit their mark truly, as long as they are aimed with both hand and mind, even if their target is star systems away. They make a ring that will turn any liquid it is dipped in into deadly poison. A transportation device that comes as close to teleportation as any in the Nine Realms have yet developed, and far more inconspicuous, sleek and streamlined than the Bifrost.

For Loki’s birthday, Angrboda makes him Jormungand, a snake that is huge enough to fill an ocean, and hides him in the Midgard sea. Not to be bested, Loki makes her Fenrir, a wolf made of darkness deep enough to swallow stars for their three year anniversary gift. He tells Hel how he’s made her childhood imaginary friend a reality, but she doesn’t seem as exited about it as he thought she’d be. No matter; Angrboda loves her gift.

They make beings that are almost as sentient as themselves, made out of almost unknown, completely untapped mystical forces of the universe, as courting gifts. 

They make living beings out of blood, magic and a mage’s tools, just because they can.

\---

After a while, Hel stops acting like she approves of their relationship. Frigga starts to ask Loki why he’s spending so long away from home, where he goes to when he’s not at the palace, does he know what the mages are talking about when they say there’s an imbalance of nature, an aberration concealed within the Northern forests. Thor tells him that he misses sparring with his brother, asks why he hasn’t joined him in a hunt for seasons now. 

Loki says nothing, diverts and distracts and deceives. He knows it can’t last forever, but he can still wish it would.

\---

When Loki and Angrboda break apart, it’s messy and painful. Their house is smashed, burned down. Their equipment, some of it rare, priceless, unique even, is destroyed. They don’t destroy anything they have made together though. Both of them want something of this to be permanent.

Loki moves back to his rooms in Asgard. He moves his clothes, his tools, his weapons, but he doesn’t take with him the peace of mind and full heart he had in isolation with Angrboda in the Northern forests. He’s still good at what he does though. It takes him less than a week to regain all the control he once had over the high courts of Asgard, a month to re-establish his influence over the governments of the other realms. His control is not absolute, but there are very few pies that do not have Loki’s fingers in them. He knows what’s going on, everywhere, always. He’s not omniscient, but Loki realised a long time ago that no one is. 

Odin doesn’t know everything, does not even know everything of his sons. He doesn’t see that Thor, despite being a truly good soul, has become conceited, brash and foolish, from living too many years without anyone telling him he’s wrong. When Loki moves back to the palace, the servants whisper that he is gaunt, pale, that he so obviously grieves for his lost loves, that he is no longer as he used to be (they who know nothing of him, they know nothing of who he used to be). But they still dote on Thor, still tell stories of his cunning and bravery, and it seems to have gone to his head. Odin has not noticed, does not see the change in Thor, and still plans to make him king, soon even. 

Odin is getting older by the day. He is not sickening - he is Aesir, he would have to be millennia older for that to be an issue - but the fact remains that he is no longer as young as he was. His body weakens, he needs to rest. After he falls into Odinsleep, he will be significantly refreshed, and possibly even able to regain his duties, if he should want to. But besides, he has been king for a long time. It is surely someone else’s turn. 

A date for the coronation is set, grows closer and closer, but Loki makes plans.


End file.
